President Obama will be nominating Dr. Regina Benjamin as Surgeon General in a Rose Garden announcement later this morning.

Benjamin, an Alabama family physician, runs a rural health clinic in Bayou La Batre. She was the first African-American woman to head a state medical society and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” last year.

Dr. Benjamin wrote about her calling to be a doctor in her her profile on the National Institutes of Health web site, “I believe it was divine intervention — it was in medical school when I realized there was nothing else I’d rather do with my life than to be a doctor. I had never seen a black doctor before I went to college, so I did not have an idea that I wanted to be one. I never thought I that I couldn’t, but I never really thought about it at all.”
Benjamin was named the Person of the Week on ABC News’ World News Tonight in 1995.

In January, it was reported that President Obama had asked CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta to be Surgeon General, and that Gupta had mulled the offer for a while, but eventually turned it down.

(via ABC News)